I was going to college up here back then, and AFAIK, it was being carried. It was aired on NBC, which would have been channel 6 back then. But it was also opposite Red Skelton and It Takes a Thief; it’s possible that you were just watching the more established shows back then.
Mannix had a secretary that was black. She often had several important lines every show. Quite feisty and helped Mannix with cases. Played by Gail Fisher. She won an Emmy in the role.
Mannix and Star Trek were my two favorite childhood shows that featured black characters in non stereotypical roles.
IIRC, the demographics were different back then, and there wasn’t a need to make a change.
And, IIRC, the “Little Rascals” didn’t exactly put the minorities in the primo roles.
For a southern show, the Andy Griffith thing wouldn’t really be the best showcase for integration: the blacks in the South weren’t on as good terms as you would have them be, and anything to indicate that the characters were BFF, or, for that matter, anything other than a service connection, would be more ridiculous than even some of Gomer’s antics.
Talking about “hateful” network executives, it’s worth remembering that at least Grant Tinker, Mort Werner, Jerry Stanley, et al. at NBC in the mid-sixties were circulating memos encouraging producers to cast more minorities in their series. A copy of one such memo delivered to Gene Roddenberry was reproduced in Inside Star Trek: The Real Story by Herb Solow and Bob Justman.
The plain answer is because the past is the past and not the present. That’s how it was back then. If the networks had put in too many black characters they would have lost much of their audience in the South.
There was an episode of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father that is relevant to this discussion. Eddie’s father (Bill Bixby) was a widower raising a son on his own. Eddie had a classmate whose mother (Cicely Tyson) was widowed so he sets them up on a blind date. The twist: the mother is black! After the initial awkwardness, they have a great time mostly by bonding over the difficulty of being a single parent. Despite how well they got along, there was no question whatsoever that that would be their one and only “date”.
Something similar happened on Lou Grant. Rossi hooked up with a pretty black woman, but it was pretty clear they would never be anything more than “just good friends.”
